Confide Brings Its Enterprise Ephemeral Messaging App To Android

There are times when having an app specifically for off-the-record conversations is totally useful. Like for instance, when you have a job like mine and people don’t want to share information unless they know it won’t come back to bite them in the ass. Which is all the more reason why the explosion in ephemeral messaging apps over the past year or so has been pretty awesome.

You could Snapchat, but no one wants to see a selfie just to exchange a few lines of text. Or you could use Telegram, but frankly, I still haven’t figured out how to do totally secure anonymized conversations on it. Or you could use Confide, which was purpose-built for the job of exchanging text that can’t really be screenshotted and once read disappears into the ether.

There was just one problem with Confide — for the last several months since launch, the app was only available on iPhone. Which means that if you wanted to have your conversations disappear with someone using an Android phone, you’d have to do it the old-fashioned way and actually just call them.

That ends today, as Confide has just launched an app for Android phones. Not only that, but it’s going to be available on a large number of legacy devices, thanks to creating an app that will be compatible with Android phones that run any version from Gingerbread on forward.

So why’s Android so important? Well, there are more Android phones than Apple phones out there in the world, and that’s especially true outside the U.S. And hey, about 50 percent of Confide’s downloads are international, so having an app that’s international-friendly is even more important.

Co-founder Howard Lerman agreed, saying, “The utility of [Confide] is tied to the number of people who are able to use it.”

Anyway, the new app isn’t just a port of the iOS version. In fact, it has a couple of features that make Android even more useful.

One of those changes is the ability to have more granular control of notifications, which enables users to turn off read receipts (which, frankly, can be a little spammy in the iOS version). The Android version was also built to be faster so that you can share your deepest darkest secrets more quickly.

Users can also now share emails with Confide in Android, which could facilitate the amount of information users will share — and hopefully make that info more relevant to recipients.